How to Downgrade macOS Mojave

You’ve already installed the new macOS Mojave Beta onto your Mac and after enjoying a few days of singing to yourself “Hello darkness, my old friend” you feel like “meh, there’s just too many bugs and glitches with this beta”.

Or perhaps you may miss your old trusty High Sierra, which didn’t occasionally freeze your apps or drain your battery.

Well, that’s to be expected since Mojave is still in Beta version.

With that being said, if you have a macOS Mojave Beta installed onto your Mac and you’d like to downgrade back to the more stable version of macOS High Sierra then this guide is for you.

However if you have not backed up, then chances are some of the more recent data and information you may have stored won’t be able to be recovered once you downgrade back to macOS High Sierra

So here’s what you do: if you feel there’s important data and information that you don’t want to lose and that you have not backed up, then don’t downgrade because you’ll lose it. Instead, just hang in there until the Fall (September or October) when the final stable version of Mojave gets released which you can upgrade automatically from your current Beta version without losing all your data. 🙂

How to Downgrade macOS Mojave to macOS High Sierra: 3 Steps

The whole process is a little time consuming, but I’ll try my best to make it a little quicker as well as simplify it in a way that is easy way for you follow.

1. Back Up Your Mac.

You’ll definitely want to back up your Mac before downgrading from macOS Mojave Beta to macOS High Sierra, just in case.

Apple has written a great step-by-step guide on how you can backup your Mac which will take you no more than 10-20 minutes.

You can pin or bookmark this page whilst you’re at it and once you’re done, you can jump back here and continue with the steps below to downgrade from macOS Mojave to macOS High Sierra. 🙂

2. Delete the macOS Mojave Beta.

Step 1: Alright, once you’ve backed up all your data on your Mac, go ahead click on the little Apple icon that is to your top left hand corner of your screen and then choose to Restart.

Now as your Mac prepares to restart, press and hold down both your Command+R keys. Keep holding them down until your Mac reboots back up.

Step 2: Good. You’ll now find that your Mac will have entered Recovery Mode. Now, click on Disk Utility in the OSX Utilities and then click Continue.

Help! I don’t think my Mac is in Recovery Mode.

If you find that your Mac is not showing up in Recovery Mode, then just jump back to Step 1 and start from there again and making sure you press both your Command and your R keys simultaneously until your Mac boots back up.

Step 3: Next, click on the Startup Disk and select the Erase tab which is at the top of the window. See it?

Step 4: Great! Now you have to enter a name for the file that you want to get rid off. It could be something like “macOS” or “macOS High High Sierra” it’s up to you and whatever you choose, as long as you can remember it, is enough.

Step 5: There’s one more thing you need to do: you need to choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the format list if your Mac is using HFS+. If your Mac is using APFS then you have to choose APFS.

Step 6: Finally, just click Erase. Once your computer has been erased, just quit Disk Utility by going to the left hand corner of your screen and selecting to return to OS X Utilities selector from the drop down menu.

Great work! You successfully removed Mojave from your Mac. The rest is pretty simple from here on out. 🙂

3. Reinstall the macOS High Sierra.

Now if your Mac came with macOS High Sierra preinstalled (when you got it the first time) then this won’t take a no longer than 10 minutes.

Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Go ahead and click on the little Apple icon which is on the top left hand corner of your screen and then select Restart from the menu. Hold down on your Option key.

Step 2: You’ll find that you be brought to a page where you need to choose the startup disk. So pick your bootable drive that is with macOS High Sierra from the list of startup disk options. The macOS High Sierra will immediately start to get installed now.

Step 3: Finally once the macOS High Sierra installation window pops up, just hit Continue, Agree to the Terms and Conditions and Voila! Your Mac will reboot back up with High Sierra installed.

What if my Mac did not come with macOS High Sierra pre-installed?

Then here’s what you do: Go grab your external hard drive and then you can just follow the step-by-step guide provided by Apple on how you can install High Sierra onto the external drive which you can then use to install High Sierra onto your Mac.

Once you have High Sierra installed onto your external drive, you can follow the above steps to reinstall macOS High Sierra.

Now you can restore all of your data back using the backup that you made earlier.

Keep reading.

4. Finally, Restore all your data and all that ‘stuff’.

Note
Make sure your Mac has an internet connection.

Step 1: Go ahead and click on the little Apple icon in the top left hand corner of your screen and then choose Restart from the menu.

Step 2: Now, press and hold down your Command +R keys. Make sure to hold the keys down until your Mac boots back up again.

Step 3: Good. Next, choose Restore from Time Machine Backup from the OSX Utilities and then hit Continue.

Step 4: Then, choose the source of your backup where you stored your Time Machine backup (the backup that you made earlier) is located.

Note

Make sure that you choose the most recent of backups that you made before you had installed macOS Mojave. If you try to restore a macOS Mojave backup on your macOS High Sierra then that’s gonna run you into some problems because both are different versions of macOS with their own different settings.

Step 5: Lastly, once all that’s finished, just click Continue and your Mac will start restoring all of your data. It may take a way, so you grab some taco 🌮 or something in the mean time.

That’s it!

Share this guide with your friends or anyone who’s looking to downgrade from the macOS Mojave Beta version. 🙂